Sad Irony

You spend years telling your housemates that the metaphorical house is not built to withstand earthquakes. For years, you are ridiculed and left to fend for yourself because you are a "doom and gloom" sayer. Then the earthquake strikes. Many parts of this house fall apart. Yesterday's experts who ignored completely what you said are now using the identical words you used in previous years to say that the house is not built properly to withstand earthquakes.

What is happening after the earthquake is the attempt to place blame on someone, so for every room that has collapsed we attempt to find the carpenter who worked on that particular room and expect him to fix it to earthquake proof standards and we scrutinize his very tools and his methodology. When the carpenter takes his 3 day long lunch break (which he always took before the earthquake struck), the experts who were responsible for allowing this 3 day long break to happen in the first place begin pulling their hair and are ready to lynch this particular carpenter. Other unrelated carpenters wisely hide in the woodwork so as to not be the next targets of lynch mobs. What the mobs don't seem to know is that they are being guided by the same experts who allowed this disaster to happen. The experts received money from the carpenters to pronounce publicly that the house was safe, the experts negotiated contracts that allowed the carpenters to have 3 day long lunch breaks.... Its only after the earthquake hit the house did the experts smoothly became the housemate's best defender against the carpenter.... after all the experts don't want to be targetedby the mob so they concentrate on assigning blame on the carpenter who was unlucky enough to have worked on the collapsed room.

So here we have it, our economy has gone poof, the unlucky corporations/industrialists who were following the accepted procedures of how our society is run are now being grilled by our politicians who never did anything about this economy until after it went poof. The politicians are trying to take responsibility now and are seeking someone to blame for this disaster. Are things going to change for the better? Here is what will happen, the rooms which have collapsed will be rebuilt using earthquake proof methods, the carpenters who have been unlucky enough to be behind these rooms will be forced to reduce their 3 day lunch breaks to a mere 6 hour lunch break. Other carpenters who were lucky enough not to be in the spotlight will volunteer to fix up their assigned rooms to make it more earthquake proof but in reality it will be mere cosmetic changes. The experts will then be bought off as before to say that the house is now earthquake proof. In the end, the house will be in worse shape and everyone will congratulate themselves at having averted the last disaster and prevented the next one..... until the next earthquake strikes.

What happens to the people who warned everyone that the house was not earthquake proof in the first place before the disaster struck? Well they are still ignored as doom and gloom sayers even though once again history has proven them correct. They will only be accepted as experts if they accept to be bought off and say that the Emperor is wearing the latest fashion. Seems like the Emperor is still naked after all of this. When do we truly change our carpenters and experts and replace them with hard-workers and wise individuals? Why are we still accepting lazy rich people as our CEOs who would get fired after the second week of a real job for being lazy? Why are we still accepting politicians who before the earthquake, said that everything was built properly and then poof after the house collapses they act as if they are outraged at having been duped.... yet decide to let the same people dupe them again?

Sad irony, the house will receive some overhaul but in the end will still not be earthquake proof because to truly do that we would have to rebuild it from scratch and no one is ready to do that. And the solution offered is still to try to get the citizenry to become avid consumers to restart the economy which is exactly what brought us to where we are today..... Sad irony.

Why the rich get richer.

There is a common saying: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life." This is a saying that gives comfort to the rich as they convince themselves of their benevolence to the poor who are ignorant. It justifies the action of not giving the poor what they need but rather making the poor jump through more hoops to get their daily bread (or fish).

What this saying neglects to mention is that while you are teaching the man how to fish, he is already starving and needs the fish NOW so then he can concentrate on the lessons. It also neglects to mention how the "teacher" loans him fish until the lessons are over to keep the student alive enough to finish the lessons.... and then the "teacher" gives the student the bill (the price for having learned such an invaluable lesson and also to pay back the loan while the student was learning how to feed himself for life).... the price is fair, for every 4 fish caught, one goes to the "teacher"....

With this scenario, the "teacher" just needs to teach 3 people how to fish and he never has to fish again and can now spend time on other pursuits.... hence he spends his free time to acquire more fish without having to fish for himself and he can then pay for bodyguards with fish to protect himself when the students wise up to the con and decide to "renegotiate" this "deal".

Of course, if you go far back in time, you discover that the student's ancestors knew how to fish but were prevented from teaching their children how to fish because the "teacher's" ancestors made a clever-sounding proposal that conned those ancestors and took advantage of them back then.... (but then again this blog is not about 3rd world history so we won't go and explore what that particular deal may have been about).... suffice it to say, the poor is not learning to fish free of charge, and he is not given fish while he learns how to fish for himself, everything is a loan to make the individual independent..... except for the fact that he is now indentured to his teacher for life.

There is a common riddle or choice given to test one's wisdom: You have a choice of receiving a one time gift of ten thousand dollars to do with what you want with it, or you can receive a penny on the first day of the month and each succeeding day of the month you get double of what you received on the previous day until the end of the month. How do you choose? If you are shrewd, you will take the penny which doubles each day of the month so that by day #21, you have received over ten thousand dollars for that day (without counting everything else that you have accumulated during the previous days). With a standard 30 day month you receive on the last day: over 5 million dollars.

Now the rich congratulate themselves again because they consider themselves generous for offering this "gift" to the poor.... so that when the poor chooses the immediate 10 thousand dollars, the rich can then say that the poor "chose" to be poor and that the rich gave them a fair shot. If you are poor and have no money, can you wait 10 days before you can afford to buy one loaf of bread for the day? Well the rich who proposed this choice know that you can't and they scoff at the poor for choosing the "wrong" choice because if they were given the choice, they would take the penny on day one and allow it to double..... They already have food in their kitchen, so they can afford to wait 21 days before seeing the results of their wise choice.....

The irony in all of this? Well the rich are given this choice by our governments to help jumpstart our economy whenever the economy is in a crisis.... Look at how we are "solving" the current economic crisis.... Jon Stewart of the Daily Show has the right idea, we should give the money to the poor who are about to lose their houses so that they can repay their debts to the banks and that way the banks regain what they lost..... the wise solution. Instead, we want to reward the rich who stole from the collectivity, who conned the majority by giving them more money so that they can con and steal from more of us.....

And that is why the rich get richer, we don't learn from our losses.... "Fool me once, shame on you.... Fool me twice, shame on me."..... Well we definitely should SHAME ourselves for giving the tools to thieves and liars..... AGAIN.

What Economic Crisis?

Well here it is, the world has a crisis, an economic one. People are losing their jobs, the rich management who made poor decisions are taking a breather and requesting public money to kickstart the economy and........ WAIT, WHAT? The business leaders who brought about this mess in the first place by abusing public funds to line their pockets, the same leaders who push the citizenry into becoming consumers and production machines, the same leaders who now face the consequences of their corruption..... THEY WANT WHAT?

Isn't that how we got into trouble in the first place? Bad decisions, no preparation for the future, reacting to situations instead of THINKING and preventing unusual situations. What do we get from this economic downturn? A knee-jerk reaction where all the nations immediately agree on a solution (proving that with the proper political will, the governments of the world can make an important decision..... of course this decision bailed out the rich from troubles more than the majority of us who are now suffering job losses).

The economy has shown its hiccup and demonstrated that our current direction is a bad one.... How do we respond? We slow down this metaphorical car but maintain the same direction despite the last bump where we damaged our car. The bureaucracy stays the same, the corruption is found and covered up (to be replaced by a yet more sophisticated corruption scheme that we will uncover in 20 years and act as shocked when it is discovered as we are "shocked" today), the business leaders or industrialists are not replaced or brought to trial..... So nothing has really changed.

If an employee or a bureaucrat had done that much damage to his company or to his bureaucratic system, we all know how that would end: a lost job and prison time. Yet when the leaders of our society do this (and I really don't mean politicians), they keep their money, they keep their assets..... AND TO ADD INSULT TO INJURY, they request public funds to bail them out..... So much for the trillions of dollars of profits done by these leaders (guess that money is gone). So the poor who followed the direction of the rich, now have to pay for obeying their master's direction.

Should society be run on charisma? knowledge? wisdom? riches? Well at the moment, it is run by riches irrelevant how you got the money, you now have the law firm to defend your acquisitions. With riches, you sponsor the charisma you need to transmit the message you want. You hire the knowledge you want and you pay for "wisdom" from sophists. Anyone tells you something you don't want to hear, you have the money to ignore that unpleasant sound....

Plato's Republic mentions that the metaphorical city would be in ruins if it was run by the industrialist who seeks after riches..... Here we live in a society that is run by the motivation of acquiring riches and we have a hiccup to make us pause and reconsider our future..... How do we respond? Seems like we will continue to fund the confirmed rich to continue stealing from us and make decisions that are senseless for society but very profitable for the few rich.

Maybe I should become a sophist.... I'd have more money and flatter my rich customer with trivialities....

So to conclude, what economic crisis? We aint changing anything..... more of the same attitude, produce and consume, ignore anything unrelated to those two activities and let the rich leaders continue in their role of our coaches as we continue to produce and consume.... If we work hard enough, we may finally get that carrot dangling in front of our faces, just beyond our reach.... just a bit more effort now!

Canada's Shame?

Well we have heard the conclusion on the RCMP's tasering of a foreign visitor at an airport in BC. This tasering activity happened moments before this individual's death, but we must not blame the RCMP officers for this death. Oh no, the conclusion offered is that this visitor was exhausted from being in the airport for about 12 or so hours without any form of understandable human contact (he didn't speak a word of english and was waiting for his mother who was prevented from speaking to him because the system never acknowledged his arrival and the fact that outsiders are not allowed into the official arrival zone). Add to the fact that the individual did not eat and was apparently a recovering alcoholic and we can understand that the taser or the RCMP wielding it were not held responsible for this death.

Imagine if a criminal had murdered someone with a taser and this was what his defence attorney brought forward to completely absolve him of any crime or wrongdoing..... well the prosecution and every law enforcement agency in the world would laugh at such a tactic.... but hey, this is different, law enforcement officials are at the wrong end this time around.... and the public is supposed to accept this as an acceptable conclusion.

Now I really don't blame the officers themselves.... they were following procedures set in bureaucratic manuals on how to deal with a situation such as this.... What I find sad is that none of them were allowed to use human judgment and make a common sense decision to deal with this instead of following proper procedure. Its simple, a person acts out, we give him command to stop or else we deploy the taser.... the individual refuses to comply, we use the taser and situation is normal as we handcuff the rowdy individual.... The training works for most offenders.... but the situation here was that this individual was OBVIOUSLY unaware of any english commands and ALL witnesses reported this to the RCMP upon arrival, but they chose to follow bureaucratic procedure than to use human judgment.

What we have here in the conclusion of the incident is an attempt at whitewashing the incident and putting blame upon the medical condition of the individual as the culprit for the unfortunate death..... Now I sympathise with the RCMP officers who arrived to deal with this unknown factor and I believe that they should not be punished.... they followed their training, to the letter.... BLINDINGLY obedient to the procedures..... the death of this victim will haunt these officers, and perhaps they will use their human judgment to assess a similar situation in the future and get some interpreter involved before using force against someone not understanding what situation he happens to be in.

What I would like to see happen is the acceptance that bureaucratic rules can not cover all situations and that we must allow senior officers to make on-the-fly judgment calls to ignore procedure when it is necessary and think outside the box. If I had been in the position of the RCMP officer on this very specific occasion, I would have determined if what the witnesses were saying was true on the comprehension of the language, I would have asked questions of how long this individual was there..... (I would have treated this as as "science-fiction-first-contact-scenario", found some food and use gestures to make him calm down until we could get someone to interpret my commands/instructions and understand this individuals needs/desires)..... Of course knowing how the security/law-enforcement mentality works, I would have been laughed at and pressured out of the force for being a "softie" for trying to understand someone who is obviously aggressive. Hey, if he made an aggressive move towards me or one of my partners or even towards some witness, I would have been the first to deploy the weapon..... but if you look at the video of what actually happened, the victim did not make any aggressive move when the 4 RCMP officers were surrounding him.... he had cowed down (perhaps he was waiting to spring.... but I would have waited for him to make the first move at that particular spot and then take him down).

As mentioned before in a previous blog.... Peaceful at first, then use of force without guilt if the person prefers the less peaceful approach. The video released to the public showed the opposite of what the RCMP tried to make us believe.... and months later, the investigation tells us that the victim's medical condition is more responsible than the tasering itself.....

So if you are ever forced to stay in some area for over 12 hours and you have not eaten during that time and no one understands what you are saying and you don't understand what they are telling you..... make sure you didn't have some alcohol to drink the night before and don't lose your temper..... you must remain calm and smiling when people in uniforms you do not recognize bark something incomprehensible to you..... if you do anything else, you will be responsible for your own death. Acceptable to you? Well that's what the conclusion of the investigation wants us to believe.

Shame on us. Sympathies to the mother who lost her child in such a way. Pity to the RCMP officers who were the unfortunate ones to be involved in this.... accident. Hate the procedures that prevent humans from using human judgment at appropriate times.

Conservative Rhetoric

Well we may be getting another possible election. The current ruling party has made a law that has made the other three political parties so upset that they are ready and willing to join together to make a coalition government. The Conservative Party is using the rhetoric that Canadians voted for a Conservative government and the Canadians rejected a Liberal government; under this logic, if the Liberal Party joins with the other two political parties to form a coalition government, then they are "stealing" power through the backdoor and ignoring the Canadian electorate who have made their choice.

This rhetoric disappoints me. One of the responsibilities of a political party in Canada is to educate Canadians on the realities of our political institution. Our current institution is one that has a parliament and this parliament is determined by members who are voted in. The parliament then takes the party with the most members and makes it the ruling authority. Coalitions are not illegal and it is not impossible to have a minority government fall and be replaced immediately by another minority government without going through elections. Our system has this already in place. Our Governor General has the power and authority to decide 3 possible choices if the Conservative Party loses a vote in parliament. Choice 1, new elections are called and we all vote for our favored delegates (1 month after the last election). Choice 2, the Liberal Party forms the new government (yes the Governor General can invite the Liberal Party to form the next government as a minority government but this is unlikely because the tradition is that the choice is given to someone who can maintain parliamentary majority). Choice 3, a coalition is formed to become a majority and the Governor General accepts this new coalition as the next government.

This is our system, right or wrong, this is how we do things. If the Conservative Party does not like this, they had since 1867 to make its case and try to inform us of any possible flaws in that parliamentary system. To claim that power would be stolen from Canadians and that they had not voted for this particular turn of events is irresponsible. The political party is there to educate how the system works and THIS is how the parliamentary system works. I personally find it ironic that the Liberal Party and the Bloc Quebecois would even consider becoming allies after being so adamantly opposed to each other on the sovereignty issue and that the Conservative Party actually conceded the most to Quebec since 1982 while the Liberal Party historically got the Constitution into Canada without Quebec's signature.... but hey, I guess integrity of their beliefs can be melted down if they can only taste the power of governing for even a few months...

I could see the NDP joining any of the political parties and form a coalition because they have the most consensus methodology in their mind. They believe in socialism and can support certain ambiguous laws if they can promote a pro-socialist law alongside with it.

What will happen? Who knows, but to make the claim that Canadians did not vote for a coalition government is to disrespect the whole notion of parliamentary government. Canadians did not technically vote for a Conservative government either.... they voted for individual members of parliament who accidently were part of a political party who managed to be the largest minority out of the other minority parties.... and so it goes.

Ya win some, ya lose some. Don't complain about the rules after you have lost the points. And remember, it is the Governor General who will make the final decision, not any particular political party. That is how our Canadian system works..... theoretically (wink wink).

Bad Design

In a previous blog I mentioned how in the past we had 10 people to do 10 people's jobs and this was gradually changed through downsizing where today we would have 4 people to do 10 people's jobs. There are other ways to get to that situation, one of them is to keep 10 people working 10 people's jobs but then increase the service or workload without hiring new people. If this is done gradually we get 10 people eventually in a situation of working the equivalent of 27 people.

These hypothetical examples do not consider technology but the equation ends up being the same. You work more than humanly possible and are expected to maintain this overwork for long periods of time. Even if technology helps out by taking the place of 3 humans, we still downsize and get rid of 7.... so we are in the same situation. Also notice that the owner or a high level boss would never tolerate such conditions in their own work environment they expect the lower managers and the employees to submit to this. If you are a rook, a queen or a king, you are never mistreated.... if you are a knight, a bishop or a pawn, then you better work harder than ever or else you will be sacrificed on the board.

Now that we have the recap out of the way from my previous blogs, here is another possible hiccup we can have overwork: the bad design of the workstation. The example I offer is Tim Hortons, before all you could get from Tim Hortons was coffee and donuts.... all that was needed was 1 cash register and away we go, rushes can still be managed and lineups are not too long. If they get too long, we open up another store. This is sensible. McDonalds, on the other hand, has 20 cash registers and they offer entire meals that need to be cooked and when there are lineups, they open up more cash registers (not all 20 are in use but they anticipate potential use of up to 20 in this illustration). So in essence, if the lineup gets too big, a new cash register is opened up and away we go the total wait time for the customer does not increase even during rushes. So far, the design works.

But Tim Hortons has decided to offer new products so that they can compete a bit more with the McDonalds clientele. Why? Why not? The problem is that Tim Hortons has not changed their internal design, or if they have, they have not changed it properly.... lets assume that they added 2 new cash registers to deal with the extra time. That becomes 3 cash registers to deal with customers who now want more than just coffee and donuts. The total wait time for everyone increases. I have seen many who walk in, look around and tell their friends, lets go to the competing coffee place next door, then they leave.... the lineup is that long and it don't move very quickly.... and for whatever reason, the customer in front of me always seems to want the most complicated meal of the establishment so that I have to wait those extra 3 minutes before I get my turn..... and all I want is my coffee (I go elsewhere if I want a meal.... why? why not?)

Now the workers at Tim Hortons are in a similar position as the 4 who work for 10 or the 10 who work for 27.... but this time it is not based on hiring less than needed or firing and having the remaining few keep up the same production.... this time it is based on bad design. The customers are growing angry and frustrated and the workers are trying to move quicker than what is healthy. Perhaps many customers are willing to tolerate this extra time because they enjoy the Tim Hortons experience.... but that is not the wisest thing to do if you rely on a customer's tolerance level to keep a bad design..... Its easy, how would a rich person handle this? A rich person who makes about 1 million dollars a year, would walk in and if he doesn't get served yesterday, he walks out.... no argument, no fuss (he might even hire someone to stand in line for him so that when he arrives, he gets what he wants yesterday and not a moment later)..... now if the rich person expects this treatment and usually gets it (but not at Tim Hortons or McDonalds.... he gets this treatment at 5 star restaurants that charge 50$ for the coffee)..... The customer at Tim Hortons would definitely appreciate being treated like the rich person..... so it would be wise for the design of this coffee place to undergo some serious change to make the customer feel rich before the competition picks up on this flaw and serves the customer in less time than Tim Hortons.

Imagine the wait time at McDonalds if they only had 3 working cash registers during rush hour.... (I never saw less than 7 and they were overwhelmed with only 7). Of course places with low populations don't suffer from this compared to big cities.... but still, it should be looked into..... and fixed.

Video games the cause of social ills?

Here we have in recent news, a child who was found dead. Apparently this child ran away because his parents prevented him from playing some video game for a day. The news media kept bringing up the issue of video games as being addictive and that people should look into it. This is one of those examples where the news media functions more on sensationalism to sell their news programs or newspapers to make money. Facts go out of the window, no thought is processed and we all spend our time listening to rhetoric and never go beyond the surface.

Now I don't want to get into the issue of how most of the news we hear is usually misrepresentation and that if you really want to know what really happened in something or other it is usually best to find out for yourself. The issue of the blog is the aftermath of this tragedy: after the child was found dead. The father goes on TV and explains that his child was into sports but because he didn't grow up physically as fast as others of his same age group he was rejected from the sports team. This rejection brought the child into the world of video games and its alleged addictions which created the social ill we all have witnessed (the child running away and being found dead). Yes, the child running away is tragic and the fact that he is found dead later on is beyond tragic (words can never describe the agony). The father wants to start up a fund to allow children who may not have the same physical development as others their immediate age range and allow them to participate in sports programs. This is noble and great and highly encourageable. What I find distasteful is that the video game is transformed once again into the scapegoat that causes social ills.

Before someone gets into a debate of whether or not video games are addictive or cause violence or whatever.... my argument is not whether video games are this or are that, my argument is that you can find the same components: the addictive elements, the encouragement of violence or lack of both etc., and find them in sports as well as video games. The ratio of addicted would be the same, the over-zealousness can be found in one as well as the other. The only difference is that sports are "socially acceptable" and that video games are "fringe activities". Our North American culture presumes that the sport is an adult activity and that the video game is a childish activity.

If the child had been into a music band and was rejected because he was not skilled enough in music for whatever reason and this child became enamoured with baseball and spent all his waking hours thinking breathing eating baseball (none of us would call that an addiction, we would call that dedication and we would encourage him in this activity). But because it was a video game, it immediately becomes suspect because the parent in question never took the time to get into his child's new interests. (See my previous blogs on how our society steals our time away from our families so that we can produce more and enjoy less of our produce) Lets continue this hypothetical situation by introducing the fact that the parent of this baseball lover is himself a musician or has a strong musical background and never understood sports or the camaraderie that you can get in sports. The child is neglecting his chores, or neglecting his studies or neglecting something (the child is unable to balance his time properly for whatever reason). This parent, who has no understanding of sports, wants his child to get some perspective so he prevents his child from doing any baseball for a day. How does the child react? It is not beyond the realm of imagination to see that this child under these circumstances may run away. Remember, he was rejected in one activity and has fallen in love with the new activity where he is accepted and he is successful and now his grump of a dad has dared prevent him from playing baseball or practicing outside with friends. "My dad spends all his time at work and never with me, why can he do what he wants and I can't?" So the child rebels and runs away.

Ideal? Of course not, but this illustration shows that the same situation can happen from being "too-involved" in another activity. Is video games to blame? Of course not, any activity could have been practiced. It is unfortunate that the communication breakdown occured between the parent and the child which brought about these events. But blaming video games is cosmetic and only deals with the symptom of the real problem. The parent did not understand the issues of the child while it was happening and thought by eliminating the one thing that seemed to isolate the child from the rest of the family would solve the problem.....

The real problem is that we don't have time to heal or to investigate our immediate relationships because we must continue to produce, produce and produce. Take the quick fix, it will solve the problem.... if it doesn't then you mis-diagnosed the problem, take the proper quick-fix for the proper problem..... you can't discern the problem properly? No problem, we have psychologists, day cares etc to take away your problem so that you can continue to produce, produce and produce!

If the parent was given the time by his society to develop a healthy relationship with his child, he would have played video games with his child, then brought him out to play some sport as well and encourage him to read up on his studies at school etc and lead by example the balanced lifestyle. The parent was not given the time and now the parent thinks that video games were the problem and will continue believing that because none of us will give him the time to "think" about it for a few minutes.

Great! A program is invented to allow disadvantaged children to play sports! But if you dump your child off in that program because you think it will avoid the video game addiction, you may have just replaced one addiction with another and a similar tragedy will not be prevented in the future. The ideal solution is to give us time to enjoy our families, our work produced, our citizenship responsibilities.... instead we proceed to take away time from what truly matters--> to work, work and work (which in reality is no longer work in the healthy sense but "produce, produce and produce!!!" in the self-destructive sense).

Sympathies to any parent who loses a child in such tragic circumstances. Encouragement offered to this new sports program.